Since I know I wish to do a musical project for the first project, I’ve got a few books to research for this first week of pre-production into ideas and themes around music and what it offers society and humans. The first book I read is Noise The Political economy of Music, as it caught my attention while roaming the library. Here are a few quotes and ideas I found interesting.
Some of the main themes within this book are the idea of music as power and offering something towards humans and society. It discusses that during capitalism, music can offer a few things, passion, dedication, escapism or mathematical works, too, following rhythm and chord progressions. As well as ideas around representations of music, if Beethoven decided his work was about something else that the listener felt, what changes within it?
The argument of Noise is that music, unique among the arts for reasons that are themselves overdetermined, has precisely this annunciatory vocation; and that the music of today stands both as a promise of a new, liberating mode of producing, and as the menace of a dystopian possibility which that mode of production’s baleful mirror image.
It’s the idea that music can offer the listener and wider society something from it. That creators of music express themselves and forge a future based on their intentions and work. Artistic works can bring together movements and others alike.
This new form of capitalism, in which the media and multinational corporations play a major role, a shift on the technological level from the older modes of industrial production of the second machine revolution to the newer cybernetic, informational nuclear modes of some Third Machine age.
This quote talks about capitalism and the impact that modern media and corporations have on it. If our society is run by capitalism, how can music creators keep their original messaging and meaning behind their work?
Today, wherever there is music, there is money. Looking only at the numbers, in certain countries more money is spent on music than on reading, drinking, or keeping clean. Music an immaterial pleasure turned commodity, now heralds a society of the sign, of the immaterial up for sale, of the social relation unified in money.
Something I’ve considered myself for a long time and half the motivation of this project, if numbers and money are everything, how can we consider musical success without the clutches of capitalism dictating what is important and worth?
Music as a mirror of society, calls this truism to our attention: society is much more than economists categories
Another quote I completely agree and also I said AI technology, such as CHAT GPT. Arts or anything created by humans reflects our selves and society and where it stands. Society isn’t just money and what areas make money. Even though we are in a capitalist system, how can we pay attention to the different works that exist?
Music is more then an object of study: it is a way of perceiving the world. A tool of understanding. Today no theorising accomplished through language or mathematics can suffice any longer.
Again something I also agree with, music is a way of perceiving and reflecting on the world. One can learn a lot from listening to current and past music to understand what is happening in society and where it will go. The anger and frustration of class division or decisions from the government.
Music, the organisation of noise, is one such form. It reflects the manufacture of society; it constitutes the audible waveband of the vibrations and signs that make up society. An instrument of understanding, it prompts us to decipher a sound form of knowledge.
This idea that music is the organisation of noise interests me as it also says that this reflects the manufacture of society. That society perhaps is also noise in an organisation similar to music. How can we navigate this “noise” to find out what we should listen to? What is worth paying attention to in a modern society where noise is so prominent.
My intent here is thus not only to theorise about music, but to theorise through music.
What is theorising through music is something I never considered. To communicate and speak to music, but to theorise through it. What projects or techniques have done this?
Fetishised as a commodity, music is illustrative of the evolution of our entire society
To make music a commodity and for financial gain reflects society. If music is a reflection of society and it has become commodified, it speaks volumes about how we deal with culture and our drive to always make money from something. What would it mean to not commodify music, and what would this look like?
For Marx music is the “mirror of reality” For Nietzsche the “expression of truth”
Again similar to previous quotes but also reflecting on two theorists and their opinions, perhaps I’ll read more into Marx and Nietzsche.
Music has become a commodity, a means of producing money. It is sold and consumed. It is analysed: What market does it have? How much profit does it generate? What business strategy is best for it? The music industry, with all of its derivatives (publishing, entertainment, records, musical instruments, record player, etc.) is a major element in and precursor of the economy of leisure and the convoy of signs.
The layers underneath the music industry have created an amalgamation that loses focus and site of the original process of creativity and where it spawns. If the only value is if it is making money, then sold through publishing, entertainment, records, etc. Then how will this reflect the art form? Perhaps the musical charts reflect this.
because it gives the worker who hears the piano recital more spirit and vitality. Only the labor of someone who creates capital is productive, so any other labor, however useful or harmful it may be, is not productive from the point of view of capitalisation; it is therefore unproductive. The producer of tobacco is productive, even though the consumption of tobacco is unproductive.
following suit, this spoke volumes to me; productivity and value are associated with money, not benefits or living quality. If dropping bombs made money, it would be the most valued thing in society. How can producing tobacco be seen as more productive to important than making music?
Even in the case of musician, value is produced if and only if he is a wage earner,
To get a job and receive a wage is when people say, “music is actually your job?” a common example is to tell people you make music. The first question will be, “Do you make money from it?” as if money is meaning behind everything or certifies that you are indeed a musician.
